Rescuing language education from the neoliberal disaster: Culturometric predictions and analyses of future policy

Abstract

Over the last three decades neoliberal government policies have spread successfully around the world with disastrous effects on the social infrastructures of many countries. Neoliberal policies move vast amounts of public money into private hands increasing the gap between rich and poor and decimating social support services for the majority of the population. Along with health and transport, government-funded education is also among the most devastated public services. Yet, in representative democracies, these policies are initially supported by the misguided self-interests of those most deleteriously affected – lecturers, teachers, students and their families, communities and institutions. This paper analyses this effect on language education through the culturometric definition of cultural identity – a concept originally inextricably bound with the teaching of languages – examining language ‘spin’ used in achieving neoliberal policy acceptance, focusing here on the current spin of ‘diversity’. By tracing western government resourcing of value changes in language education through their international change events over the last three decades we show – in contradiction to neoliberal policy documents such as the ‘Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment’ – how the potential diversity for student educational outcomes of language education has shrunk under neoliberal education governance to the single option of ‘employee-ment’ – the identity of an ideal employee. We evidence how culture has been stripped from language education and replaced by training employee-ment skills to current policy compliancy standards. To recover from this disaster we then deconstruct cultural diversity in language education to deduce policy amendments to the Common European Framework that would authentically increase cultural diversity as it is valued by the international community of language educators. We conclude by extrapolating the past three decades of changes in resourcing language education towards two possible futures – a future predicated on the employee-ment values of the current common framework and a future predicted by the deduced policy amendments to the framework for authentically enhancing cultural diversity through language education.